According to more FFMPEG docs, VAAPI can effectively do all the Hardware Acceleration for Decode/Encode that I _could_ care about (check first AND second table) : https://trac.ffmpeg....ki/HWAccelIntro

Looks like an AMD R5 430 GPU can be had for ~$35 USD (before shipping, etc).

I suspect I would need to enable the AMDGPU driver in the guest OS in the VM (which is easy as it is Ubuntu).

Am I barking up the right tree here? I have plenty of CPU, but it seems like passing a GPU through to the VM will make the environment more responsive, in terms of, command issued to play video, time until first frame of video & audio is played.